The Obelisk of Ashkar
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1937. Half a map, and a rival four days ahead.
March 1937. Your teacher was opened in a hotel room in Cairo for half a leaf of vellum, and the man who did it — Ernst Krauss, white linen, clean boots, other people's money — is already upriver with forty men and a case of dynamite. You have the other half of nothing, eleven days' head start that you have already spent nine of, and a boat ticket to Tangier.
What you are both looking for is the Obelisk: a stone that is not a treasure map but a gazetteer, compiled by nine surveyors who measured every road out of the world and walked most of them. Four leaves of it survive — vellum, jade, lead and ivory — and each one points at the next.
Five acts, and each one is a different kind of dangerous
Act I — The Bazaar of Tangier. The tutorial. Nothing here can kill you and a great deal of it can be missed. Rob a loose brick for a silver coin, carry water to a beggar who trades in information, and spook a carpet merchant with a torn armband until he leaves his own shop.
Act II — The Temple of Xu'kal. Death goes live. A dart corridor you cross by walking only on the jaguar-paw slabs; a forty-foot chasm with two genuine solutions; and a golden idol standing on a weighing plate that will not be fooled by anything except its own weight in wet sand.
Act III — The Drowned Cathedral. A Norman abbey on a Breton tidal rock, walkable for one low water. The crypt floods from the bottom up on a schedule that is carved on the chapel wall before you go down — and the one tool you cannot finish without is in the room that goes under first.
Act IV — The Necropolis of Sekh-Ra. A cipher you actually decode. The glyph primer from Act I gives you two signs; three rubbings taken off three tombs give you the rest; and the primer's own first line tells you the thing that makes the door open.
Act V — The Vault of the Obelisk. Three trials, each one the exact inversion of a lesson an earlier act taught you to survive, and each with one of Krauss's people lying at it to show you the wrong answer. Then a choice with no correct option and three different endings.
What makes it hard
The satchel. Items are not scenery: the whip and the rope are two answers to one chasm, the sand pouch is the only thing standing between you and the floor of the offering room, and going into a temple without oil in your lamp is a slow death by stumbling. Five optional treasures are scattered across the five acts, all of them avoidable and all of them dangerous, and the ending counts them.
Roughly two to three hours on a first play, and about half that if you already know where the traps are. Autosaves every turn, checkpoints at every act.
Stuck?
The hint page gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling anything you have not asked about. The full walkthrough is there if you would rather just be told.